The invention relates in general to portable communication devices and more specifically to techniques for managing applications in a portable communication device.
Portable communication devices such as cellular telephones and personal digital assistants (PDAs) are increasingly providing more functions and services. In addition to providing voice communication functions, many portable communications run other applications such as games, video viewing and recording, digital photograph display and capture, sound and music playing, and sound recording applications. Conventional portable communication devices include digital signal processors (DSPs) that run modules that facilitate the operation of the different applications. The modules are sections of firmware code that perform a particular task or calculation. Conventional portable communication devices are limited, however, in that modules required for all supported applications can not be loaded onto the DSP because of the aggregate size of the modules. In addition, the processing power of a DSP engine is not sufficient to simultaneously run all of the modules. Further, no mechanism exists for suspending applications to load modules into the DSP to support other applications.
Accordingly, there is a need for techniques for managing applications in a portable communication device.